Blowback: Here Comes Another Piece of the Sixth Avenue El

100,000 brand new AK-47s and 80,000 pistols are AWOL in Iraq. Can't find 'em. Can't imagine who would want them. Wups, there they--*

New York used to have an elevated train like Chicago's, until it was scrapped in the 1930s and sold for steel to the Japanese. New Yorkers in the Pacific during World War Two would complain, "here comes another piece of the old Sixth Avenue El" as another Japanese barrage started. E. E. Cummings used the phrase as the punchline for his poem "plato told him":

plato told
him:he couldn’t
believe it (jesus
told him;he
wouldn’t believe
it) lao
tsze
certainly told
him,and general
(yes
mam)
sherman;
and even
(believe it
or
not) you
told him:i told
him;we told him
(he didn’t believe it,no
sir) it took
a nipponized bit of
the old sixth
avenue
el; in the top of his head:to tell
him
(e.e. cummings, 1944)

Now the GAO can't find 100,000 AK-47 assault rifles and 80,000 pistols that were sent to Iraq between 2004 and 2006, with helmets and body armor to match. Just gone, stolen, lost to the black market and the People Who Are Trying to Kill Us.

Who the hell was in charge? Wait, this just gets better. The officer responsible for training Iraqi troops-- and signing off on their weapons-- in that period was General David Petraeus, now overall commander of American forces in Iraq. Poor bastard can't catch a break.

My father-in-law was musing as to why Petreus took this job after others demurred. If it was sheer careerism, then he deserves every piece of blowback that comes his way, and God help the people standing next to him. If he accepted out of honor, when you're the only one willing to clean up someone else's mess, then I embrace him as a brother and a friend.

I like to think that the other generals tricked him, like the Stooges used to stick Curly with the blame. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff must have asked, "Who wants to cleanup this disaster Bush left behind?", and General Moe and General Larry kept pointing to each other and switching places until poor Petreus was stuck at the end of the line.